Ernst II (Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha)

He received an excellent education, completed at the University of Bonn . He served in the army of the Kingdom of Saxony .

In 1840 he came to England at the invitation of his uncle, King of Belgium Leopold I , as the groom of his cousin, Queen Victoria of Great Britain , together with her younger brother Albert .

He ascended the throne in 1844 and tried to rule in the spirit of liberalism . In 1848, he granted his subjects timely concessions and thereby protected his duchy from revolution. In 1849 he octered the democratic constitution.

He took part in the war with Denmark and participated in the battle of Eckernferd. Joining the "union of the three kings", contributed to the unifying aspirations of Prussia. After the final triumph of reaction in 1852, Ernst replaced the 1849 constitution with another, less liberal, and the personal union between Coburg and Gotha was turned into a real one. The reaction in his domain did not take a sharp character; he continued to act in the spirit of moderate liberalism.

In 1859 he tried to drag Prussia into the war with France. In the 1860s, he expected the separation of Germany from Austria, since then he saw in Bismarck the embodiment of the feudal reaction. He played an active role at the Frankfurt Congress of Princes.

After the death of Frederick VII of Denmark, he stood for the rejection of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark and for the candidacy of the Duke of Augustenburg . In this sense, he was busy with Napoleon III , with whom he had long been on good terms. Ernst gradually came to the conclusion that the future belongs to Prussia, and during the crisis of 1866 he took her side.

In 1867, he joined the newly emerged North German Union .

In 1870-1871 he accompanied William I to France.

Ernst was also known as a composer; he wrote operas: Zaïre, Casilda, Santa Chiara, Diana von Solanges and other musical works.

In 1862, he took a trip to Egypt and Abyssinia, the results of which were published in the magnificent publication Reise des Herzogs Ernst von Sachsen-Koburg-Gotha nach Aegypten etc. (Leipzig, 1864). His memoirs “Aus meinem Leben und meiner Zeit” were published in Berlin in 1887-1889. In them, in particular, he was one of the first Europeans to describe the Bilin people ^[5] .

On May 3, 1842, he married Alexandrina of Baden , the eldest daughter of Leopold , the Grand Duke of Baden and Sophia of Sweden . The marriage was childless. The throne was inherited by his nephew - the second son of Queen Victoria and Albert - Alfred Ernst , Duke of Edinburgh.

• Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.